


Chante à Nouveau

by Amy R (Brightknightie)



Category: Forever Knight
Genre: Community: fkficfest, F/M, Flashbacks, Historical, Medieval, Music, Singing, Troubadors, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-29
Updated: 2012-07-29
Packaged: 2017-11-10 23:24:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/471880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brightknightie/pseuds/Amy%20R
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lacroix asks Urs to help him fulfill a promise to Fleur.  (Flashbacks to 1239.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Downbeat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hearts_blood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearts_blood/gifts).



“I’m an outsider,” Urs sang, “looking in.”  She signaled the band to repeat the bridge.  This time, she would not serenade the whole stand-in crowd of wait staff arriving for work and basement dwellers waking for play.  She would not sing for herself, her bandmates and their art.  Instead, across the mostly empty club, through melody and harmony and steady beat, she sought the eyes of the one listener who mattered: the Raven’s owner, Lucien Lacroix.  Tall and blunt-featured, he leaned against the bar with his arms crossed over his black-on-black-on-black suit, his white-blond hair cut militarily short, his expression unreadable.

Urs wrapped her voice around him.  “You can’t run from what you are; you can’t hide all the pain.”  She plied the vocalist’s role with a century of experience, offering each word as intimately as if it had just come to her.  She could do this, she reminded herself; she would not let anyone down.  Here, inside the music and in front of an audience, she had always been appreciated and approved.  Here, she had never been alone.  “I’m the outsider...”

When the final chord capped the song, Urs dropped her gaze and stepped back from the microphone.  She could hear mortal hearts beating in the sudden silence, but nothing else.  No applause, no derision.  No decision.  When Urs looked up, she found everyone else’s eyes on Lacroix.  Lacroix’s eyes were on her.

“Gentlemen — and lady.”  Lacroix raised his red-filled glass.  “That will do.  Tuesdays and Thursdays for now.  Begin tonight, if you have no prior obligations.”

Urs gasped in relief.

Someone began clapping; others joined in.  “All right!” Morris thrust his left fist in the air; his right hand balanced his guitar on its strap.  Theo ran a cheery flourish up his keyboard.  From behind his drums, Hiroshi said, “You can count on us, Lacroix.”

“I trust that I can,” the ancient, vampiric, club owner sipped his drink.  “Now, I believe that we all have preparations to complete before the doors open.”  Lacroix strode toward his broadcasting booth in the back.  The bartenders, servers and bouncers clocked in, and the Raven’s remaining residents wandered out into the winter night on their own pursuits.

“Our first gig!  On our first try!”  Theo jumped up from his bench and hugged Urs and then Morris; Hiroshi fended off his hug, wielding his drumsticks like weapons.  The skinny, bespectacled pianist blew him a kiss instead.  “I’ve got to call people!  I’ve got to—”

“You’ve got to take a deep breath,” Hiroshi raised his eyebrows, “and then we’ve got to plump up our set list.  I wasn’t expecting this kind of turnaround!  When Lacroix finally stopped the cage dancing and strip teases, I figured that the Raven would go back to being a discothèque, the way Janette ran it — all recorded music — especially considering the old dragon’s interest in that radio station.”

“You said that he put out the call for live entertainment himself. We're alive!”  Morris’s grin gleamed against his bushy black beard and brown skin.  Urs and Hiroshi, the band’s two vampires, exchanged a look.  Morris said, “It’s our good luck that the exotic stuff didn’t give the business whatever he was looking for.”  Morris lifted his guitar strap over his shoulder and set his instrument in its case.  “Oh — no offense, Urs.”

“None taken.”  Urs had been employed at the Raven as a dancer for several months, since shortly after the club’s previous owner had moved on.  At first, Urs had appreciated a familiar way to earn her keep as she settled into Toronto’s unusual vampire community, but, recently, it had become an anchor in waters from which she was trying to surface.  She danced for others.  She sang for ... herself as well as others.  It was a start.  “Believe me, I like this better, too.”

Hiroshi tapped the hi-hat cymbal.  “So!  Great job on the audition, everyone.  Now for the real thing!  Theo, give that other ballad a run-through.  Morris, yeah, we’ll need the amp after all.”  He hesitated.  “Urs, not that you don’t look spectacular, but—”

Urs glanced down at her pink t-shirt and loose jeans.  “I should change, shouldn’t I?”

“Singer’s burden,” Hiroshi said.  He and Morris were wearing t-shirts and old jeans themselves; Theo had pulled on a screenprinted sweatshirt because he was cold.  “Woman singer’s burden,” Hiroshi amended.  “All eyes are on you.  Can your wardrobe say alternative-folk-synth-metal-jazz?”

“And overnight success?” Morris asked.

Theo laughed.  “Also sexy-innocent, smart-stupid, tough-vulnerable...”

Urs rolled her eyes.  She ran downstairs to the small room she shared with two other women vampires and dug into her third of the closet.  Neither as showy as what she had worn when dancing, nor as classy as she had heard Janette had favored, the outfit Urs settled on combined a black leather skirt and boots with a white lace blouse, topped by a red velvet ribbon around her neck.  With the mirror to herself for once, she quickly resettled her short blonde curls and touched up her cosmetics; blue shadow to match her blue eyes was a decade out of style, she remembered with disappointment, settling for silver instead.

In less time than it would take Morris to set up the amp, Urs was upstairs again.  On her way to the stage, the phone on the wall near Lacroix’s booth caught her eye.  Like Theo, she had people she wanted to tell, and Screed had wired the vacant church building into Bell Canada on a so-far overlooked line, but she hesitated.  Lacroix, standing in the doorway of his booth with his arms crossed, nodded for her to go ahead.  She dialed.

After ten rings, Javier answered.  “Yeah?”

“It’s me.  We got the job!”

“That’s great.  Congratulations.”  Javier paused.  “I’m really glad that you have a new crew to run with.”

Urs felt her brow crease.  “You’re welcome to join us, you know.”  He had planned to leave her behind in Toronto to fend for herself again.  As her father had left her family; as every man so far had betrayed her, eventually, when she had looked in them for him, as Jacqueline had seen.  Only Nick — Detective Knight — intervening had made Javier stay, and Nick had given her more moral support than Javier since Jacqueline.  Javier had made Urs a vampire, but ... he could not be suggesting that _she_ was the one pushing _him_ away now, could he?  “I wouldn’t even have thought of another guitarist if—”

“I know,” he interrupted gently.  “Break a leg.”

— ♫ —

“Hush him, Nicholas,” Lacroix growled.  “With your sword’s pommel, if necessary.”

Obediently, the former crusader dropped back to attend the moaning steward suspended in an awkward sling between two of the servants’ horses.  The man's broken leg had been splinted, but he had proven immune to vampiric ensorcellment and incapable of bearing the pain silently without ... encouragement.  Ah, there.  With all human voices stilled, only the shifting horses, clinking tack and skulking forest fauna interrupted the sputtering winter wind.

Expecting more snow, Lacroix adjusted his black wolf-fur cloak and returned his gaze to the moonlit ridge on which Castle Ventadorn towered over them.  High above the confluence of the Ardeche and Fontaulière, it appeared to be of typical Savoy construction, with the keep attached to the surrounding wall, and a drawbridge entrance to the exterior fortification.  They would not normally gain access after sunset — night being the dominion of monsters even more than bandits, as everyone knew; a recurring inconvenience on Lacroix’s travels — but they had sent messengers ahead to beg indulgence for the members of their party injured in the snowslide days before.  More, the Count de Ventadorn had fought in the ill-fated Damietta campaign alongside Lacroix’s _protégé_.

Nicholas reined in his horse at Lacroix’s side.  “I know that you don’t approve, but I hazard that it is more for the sake of a comrade in arms than for Christian charity that Ebles opens his door and burns welcoming torches this frigid night.”

“Need I remind you of what happened at Castle Brabant ten years ago?”  Lacroix snorted.  He had willed his passion for Nicholas’s sister from his mind, never dwelling on the loss to himself and their kind that she remained mortal, but only on the bargain by which Nicholas had so blithely exchanged his future for her present.  Lacroix had placed a premium on that future.  It was enough. It had to be.  “My stance on entangling yourself with the fetid trailings of your mortal existence stands.  Still: never scorn an advantage.”  He raised a gloved hand and signaled the party to press forward again, up the narrow mountain path.  “How is Monseiur Savaric?”

“He will live,” Nicholas said.  “Must he live?”

Lacroix chuckled.  “He who controls this inheritance controls the woman who controls the Doge.  I cannot do without him ... yet.”

“If Janette had come, she could have impersonated the Lady Garsenda directly.”

“If you can dislodge Janette from Venice and its parties in deepest winter, Nicholas, to journey overland in service of a political intrigue that may not yield fruit for a decade hence, your powers exceed my wildest imaginings.”

The party surmounted the ridge.  Once the guards confirmed their identities, servants led the horses away in one direction and carried the injured in another.  Ushered into the great hall, Lacroix was surprised by luxurious candle trees and oil lamps, and rich music — instruments and voices both — that tapered away as attention turned to the strangers.  This was not the rural stronghold, isolated in the mountain fastness, that he had expected.

“Sir Nicholas!”  A bald man in a bearskin robe broke from a clot of courtiers and waved them over.

“Sir Ebles!”  Nicholas grinned.  Then he remembered, and bowed.  “ _Monsieur le comte_.”

The Count de Ventadorn inclined his head, but, when Nicholas rose, embraced him heartily.  “I am blessed to see you again, Sir Nicholas!  Your misfortune with that snowslide is the great fortune of our court, to entertain such visitors and brighten this bleak cusp of winter.”  Under his breath, Ebles added, “There’s not a day of age on you, man!  You must tell me how you do it.”

A graceful noblewoman entered from a side room, accompanied by a handful of attendants.  Black and silver curls snuck out the hem of her white barbette and coiff.  Ebles introduced her: “My wife, Ventadorn’s Countess, Maria de Turenne.”

“ _Madame le comtesse_ ,” Nicholas greeted her.

“Welcome, Sir Nicholas.  You have always figured largely in my husband’s tales of his Levantine exploits.”  Her smile crinkled the corners of her eyes.  “I am told that your injured companions are well settled for the night.  Those versed in healing will see them in the morning.”

“My thanks, your ladyship.”

“I have heard that name,” Lacroix said, pleased to be able to flatter with fact as he made his obeisance.  This unplanned sojourn was beginning to show promise.  “Lady Maria, the most wise and generous patron of the new poetry in the Limousin, and the lovely inspiration of many a lovely verse.”

She laughed.  “And to which of the troubadours should I convey this compliment, I wonder?  It surely belongs to them, not me.”

“A muse should not be without honor from her artist’s audience, as well as from her artist.”

“Prettily said!”  Another matron entered from the side room.  Dressed on a par with the Countess, she stood more than a hand taller, and honey-blonde hair filled the crespine net at the back of her neck.  When she boldly turned her eyes up to Lacroix’s, he froze — colder than winter, stiller than death.

It could not be.

_“Lucien, please, take me.  I cannot live without you.”_

She said, “I was checking the injured, so I missed the beginning of this, but dear Lady Maria is more like Athena than a mere muse, you will surely agree when you know her better.  She crafts verses herself — well enough to goad even Lord Gui d’Ussel!”

“We have a surprise for you, Sir Nicholas.”  Ebles beamed.  “And for you, Lady F—”

“Nicholas?!”  The late-arriving woman cried.  In two steps, she was in Nicholas’s arms.  “Oh, my dearest brother!  I never thought I would see you again.”

Lacroix curled his fingers into fists to keep himself from reaching for what should have been his all along.  Emotions woke that he had slain and buried.  Ten years, it had been, and though her mortal body had changed, nothing in him cared.  The tang of her thorn-pricked finger in the garden of Castle Brabant stirred on his tongue and in his veins.

_“I’ve never felt such closeness as this bond I seem to have with you.”  
“As if we’ve been together forever.”_

“Fleur de Brabant, the _Comtesse de Corréze_ ,” Ebles finished.

Ten years, it had been.  Lacroix’s agreement with Nicholas was his tithe to Hell.


	2. Verse

“Allow me.”  Lacroix took the amplifier from Urs as she approached the back door.  “While I do not doubt that the strength of our kind is more than adequate to the task, belying your lovely, delicate exterior, we must maintain appearances.”

“Thanks.”  Urs opened and held the door for Lacroix.  This had been the band’s third turn on the Raven’s stage, and she had made a point after each performance of moving a piece of equipment with her own two hands, partly to support the guys’ first focus on their own instruments, but also to show herself that she really was pulling her weight in every way — that she was not, yet again, seeking someone else to protect and validate her; not, yet again, succumbing to the thorny truth with which Jacqueline had baited her before Ellen had jumped to her death.  Possibly the amp had been a step too far, though, Urs admitted.  She watched Lacroix’s muscles shift under his black collared shirt and slacks as he effortlessly settled the device into Morris’s open trunk.  “I guess that if it’s something Theo can’t lift on his own, I’d better not, either.”

“At least not where anyone whom we cannot influence might observe.”  Lacroix brushed off his hands and looked up at the sky.

Urs glanced up, too, instinctively checking for the dawn that was still hours away this time of year; she found only stars against the black, above the city’s orange glow.  The sounds of the very latest and earliest traffic and industry overlapped in a banked rumble.  She ventured, “Your customers seem happy with the new line-up.”

“Yes, they do.”  Lacroix looked back at her.  “I am pleased with the slight shift in clientele, as well.  These are more interesting, on the whole, if slightly less ... well, a stimulating hunt is always worth the effort.”

“Oh.”  Urs crossed her arms.  That she might be luring her listeners to their deaths was a new and upsetting thought.  “Is that why you did it?  To, um, hunt more?”

“Better, not more,” Lacroix corrected.  “Overindulgence is rarely feasible in these ... constrained times.  And no, not entirely.  I do value live performances, myself.  I respect — and enjoy — what you and your colleagues accomplish.  The innovations of recording and playback have been ... mixed blessings.”

“But you’re a deejay.”

“I’m also a musician.”  Lacroix smiled slightly.  “You didn’t know that?  No, of course; why would you?  But while I have honed my skills over time, I have never had the talent I hear in you and your friends.  I have more often loved Euterpe’s _protégés_ than courted her directly.”

“Nick plays piano.”  Urs ignored the word she didn't know as she recalled her first visit to Nick’s loft.  After Jacqueline’s death, before Urs spoke to Javier, Nick had listened to her puzzle through Jacqueline’s insight, and had applauded her resolve to free herself from that cycle.  He had also played and played and played, giving her space and company at the same time.  Somehow, he had made her feel strong.  He had helped her believe that she could be happy.  She thought about that a lot.  Surfacing from the memory, Urs asked Lacroix, “What’s your instrument?”  Belatedly, she added, “Or do you sing?”

“No, I do not sing.”  Lacroix sat on the edge of the open trunk.  “Nicholas does, in addition to playing that immobile monstrosity that he has hauled around for half a century, but I ... have no voice.  Not like him, or you, or...”  Lacroix pulled a folded paper out of his breast pocket.  “That reminds me.  Might you consider singing this sometime?”

Urs set the door so that it would not lock behind her.  Lacroix released the paper only when she was so near that he could read with her as she unfolded the sheet.  It was thick, old, worn and creased.  The small square reminded her that paper had not always come in standard shapes or sizes.  The brown ink had once been black, set down by a pen that made some lines thick and others thin, like the one with which she had painstakingly learned to write a hundred years ago.  She could read the letters, but the words made little sense.  “Um, is this French or Spanish?”

“Occitan — Limousan, as it was then.  The _langue d'oc_.  Do you know Catalan?”

“No.”

“Pity.  Well, pronounce it between French and Italian; that will be close enough.”

“I’m sorry,” Urs handed back the paper.  “I can’t.”

Lacroix frowned.

“I mean, I could maybe sound out the words, but that staff has only four lines and no clefs or anything.  I don’t— I’m not— Is it _supposed_ to look like that?  Where’s middle C?”

“Modern notation!  Of course.”  He looked down at the sheet.  “I should have thought of that the last time I re-copied it.”  His lips twitched up at the corners.  “You were not yet born, then.  I shall transcribe it for you.”

“What is it?” Urs asked.

“That’s the last,” Hiroshi’s voice came through the door just before it opened and Urs’s bandmates stepped out, hands and arms full of bags and cases.

Lacroix stood.  Faster than Urs could see, the paper disappeared.

“Urs!  No coat again!”  Morris glowered down at her.  “You’re worse than Hiroshi.  You’re both going to get pneumonia, and then where will we be?”

“I’m heading right back inside!”  Urs smiled up at Morris and stood on her toes to kiss his cheek.  She whispered, “Thank you for caring.”

“Excellent work tonight, gentlemen and Urs,” Lacroix said.  “Have you yet settled on a name for your ensemble?  It will assist with promotion.”

“We’re working on it.”  Theo exchanged an uneasy glance with Hiroshi; the vampire drummer had so far vetoed all the human pianist’s ideas.  Urs personally thought that Hiroshi was too picky, but that Morris was not picky enough, approving even the most overwrought of Theo’s “emo” naming schemes.  Theo himself was just young — as young as she had been when she had asked Javier to give her an ending, and he had instead given her forever.  Words mattered.

“Don’t take too long.”  Lacroix looked at each musician in turn, and then crossed to open the back door for Urs.  “Or I may have to choose for you.”

— ♫ —

“Do none of the sauces appeal to you, Maria?” Fleur fussed at the Countess de Ventadorn, whose prenatal lack of appetite Lacroix found useful in covering his own and Nicholas’s vampiric disinterest in mortal foodstuffs, as all sat together at the high table in Castle Ventadorn’s great hall.

“Leave her,” Ebles chuckled.  “She is always like this at this stage.”

“The meal is fine, Fleur, and for goodness’ sake, don’t tell Cook otherwise.”  Maria pushed away her meat with her knife; her husband speared it with his.  “I’ll just nibble on bread for now, and look forward to stewed fruit later.”

After three nights as guests of the castle, Lacroix and Nicholas had contrived to disguise how they must shun the sunlight, and had learned that the upland shepherds in the hooded cloaks went unmissed.  They had agreed that they would stay until Monsieur Savaric, the steward with the inheritance protocol, was able to travel on.  Most importantly to Lacroix, he had convinced Fleur that she had known him at the court of her oldest brother, the Duke, and thus they could bypass formalities and begin closer than strangers just met — but this half-truth tore open Lacroix’s scars.

Of course she did not remember him.  Lacroix had stood by as Nicholas had locked down those moments, those feelings ... Lacroix’s promise to her.

_“That you and I will never die, that we will have each other for all eternity.”_  
 _“What an impossible dream!”_  
 _“There is a way, my precious flower.”_

Fleur had been married and borne children, most recently a boy, Andre.  Her indulgent — or possibly just overwhelmed, Lacroix sneered — husband had allowed her to visit her convent-school friend Maria during the latter’s latest pregnancy, but the men’s excuse had little to do with the ladies’ activities.  The new poetry, as some still called it — vernacular lyrics of _fin amors_ — was Fleur’s latest passion; Maria was teaching her.  And after each evening’s meal, they had music.  Last night, Lacroix had heard Fleur sing an ode she had composed in Maria’s honor, in the form of any troubadour to his lady.  All assembled had treated it as a good joke.

Lacroix, however, had heard Fleur’s creation echoing Fleur’s blood.  Ten years ago, he had pledged Nicholas not to take her.  But even now, all she was cried out to belong to him.  Lacroix had stalked out of the great hall before anyone — especially Nicholas — saw his eyes flash with more than reflected flame.

_“You cannot be in love. There is not a shred of humanity left in you.”_  
 _“How do you think this makes me feel? I cannot control it.  I cannot accept it.  And yet it is!”_

“I fear that you find us sadly dull at this time of year, Monsieur Lacroix,” Maria said, “not at all the lively court of which you heard sung.  Up here in the mountains, we spend many a dreary month unvisited by any human soul, and manage only such amusements as we ourselves can contrive.”

“I find it unfathomable that such a talented company could ever be bored, your ladyship,” Lacroix replied.

Ebles snorted.  “No hunting, no travel, and Lent around the corner to eke out waning stores till spring.  Penned up since the snows came!  No assembly shows its best as winter drags on.”

“It is not the season for banquets, of course, but perhaps ... a game?”

“That sounds promising!” Fleur leaned in.  “An amusement larger than a riddle, but smaller than a pageant.  What sort of game do you propose?”

Nicholas crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows at Lacroix.

“A competition.”  Lacroix wiped his hands on the tablecloth in the most well-bred manner.  “In ancient days, pagans thought to propitiate Flora, the goddess of vegetation and spring, with a festival in her honor—”

“Floralia,” Fleur’s eyes widened.  “You have read Pliny’s _Natural History_!  Or — Ovid?  Juvenal?”

“All three.”  Lacroix basked in Fleur’s curiosity, so like desire.  He wished he could tell her that while he had indeed read what she had, he had also known the festival more intimately.  Would she be shocked at how Seline’s profession had really celebrated, or would Fleur’s thirst for knowledge smother petty moral concerns, as it had when she had confronted vampirism ten years before?

_“My only wish is to be with the one I love! I am interested in so many things that are of another world.  Why should this be different?”_

Lacroix shut his eyes briefly, as memory and fantasy collided.  “I propose a contest of lyric poetry, with each entry to be sung, not merely recited, over a series of nights.  As it would doubtless diminish all our pleasure if the Countess could not enter herself,” Lacroix nodded to Maria, “instead of naming her judge of all, all members of the household — not down to every scullion; you know whom I mean — will be provided a token to bestow on their favorite.”

Smiling, Maria folded her hands.  “I submit two refinements.  First, that we set subjects — faith, hope and love — the better to compare.  Second, that the tokens be bestowed most secretly.”

“What shall be the prize?” Fleur wondered.

Lacroix inclined his head.  “Immortality.”


	3. Chorus

“Come in.”

Urs turned the knob and stepped into Lacroix’s private office.  When he had asked her to come by after the last set tonight, she had had to ask directions.  This was neither his CERK deejay booth just off the dance floor, nor the lounge where he kept his premium stock and entertained business associates, but part of his personal suite upstairs.  It was nevertheless an ordinary office, as far as she could see, with file cabinets and bookshelves, and two visitor chairs in front of one large desk.  A framed map of the world covered the wall where she guessed a window belonged.  “I didn’t realize the Raven was so big.”

“This is not part of the club, as such,” Lacroix said, typing with his eyes on his screen.  “I grant your point, though.  These chambers are even better disguised than the basement accommodations.  Janette can be endlessly clever when it suits her — though it rarely does, for reasons I have yet to unravel.”  Lacroix shut down his computer and circled his desk to pull out a chair for Urs.

“Thank you.”  She sat, grateful that she had stopped to change her stage dress for jeans and a t-shirt.  Her clothes were not in remotely the same league as Lacroix’s bespoke black-on-black suit, but at least she did not need to struggle to gracefully manage a miniskirt in a chair.  And people today thought bustles had been awkward!

Lacroix handed her a computer print-out.  It was the same song that he had shown her the other night, but with the lyrics in an ordinary newspaper typeface, and the music on standard five-line staff, with all the expected symbols.  She looked up again when he said, “I wish to be clear that I am requesting a favor.  Singing this is no part of your employment.  It is personal.  Do feel free to ... consider ... saying ‘no.’”

Urs couldn't read his expression.  Lacroix’s reputation didn't include taking “no” for an answer.  Dropping her eyes again to the paper, she read, “ _Bels amics gens_.”

“‘Handsome noble friend,’” he translated.  “It was a conventional epithet by which a _trobairitz_ addressed her courtly lover.  As the primary alternate idiom was _bel douz amics_ , ‘sweet handsome friend,’ I feel that her choice flatters us both.”

“‘ _Troubairitz_ ,’” Urs repeated.  “Woman troubadour?”  She tilted her head at the paper.  “What is this?  To you?”

“An evergreen memory?  A shard of a shattered heart?”  Lacroix snorted.  “Maudlin!”

Urs pulled back, unsure whether he meant her question or his answer.

Lacroix spread his hands and sank into the other chair.  He wrapped his fingers around the armrests.  “What it is, Urs, is a promise that I have yet to keep.  Will you help me redeem my word?”

Urs pursed her lips.  Nick had warned her to give Lacroix’s projects — Nick called them “schemes” — wide berth for her own safety.  She saw no harm in a song, though.  And she believed in keeping promises.  Maybe — the idea filtered up from the deposit uncovered by Jacqueline — maybe Urs even believed in fidelity the way that Nick believed in humanity.  She tucked that perplexity away for later.

Urs stood.  Filling her lungs, she lifted the sheet and sang.  Sight-reading meant stumbles, and the strange pace and reach did not help, but by the end, she found herself happily caught in the cadence.  She did not understand all the words, but the melody and rhyme reached her, anyway.  It was fun.

“Thank you,” Lacroix breathed when the last note had faded.  As he opened his eyes, Urs realized that he had closed them throughout the song.  “I haven’t heard those words since ...  The tune, however, I have managed to hold myself.”  He crossed to one of the bookshelves, from the top of which he lifted down a leather case.  It held a bowed, stringed instrument, apparently carved from a single block of wood; it was rounder and smaller than a violin.  Urs had never seen one before.  Lacroix asked, “Will you indulge me?”

“Of course.”  Urs held out the score to share; Lacroix shook his head.  She realized — of course! — he must know it by heart.  Urs began singing again from the first bar, buoyed this time by the chords Lacroix’s instrument shared, fulfilling the melody’s promise with harmony.  With all its parts assembled, the song alternated sweet, spirited verses with solemn, nourishing ones.  Urs enjoyed the piece in itself, and also in the thrill of collaboration between her voice and Lacroix’s bow.  There was a game in the song, but without the words, she could not learn its rules.

“Again?” Lacroix asked.

Again, Urs sang to his playing.  This time, all the parts disappeared inside the music’s wholeness.  When the song ended, Urs stood, silent, exhilarated, trying to stay where it had carried her.  “Are there more?”

Lacroix turned to set his instrument and bow in their case.  “No,” he said at last, keeping his back to Urs.  His voice rolled thin with precision.  “This is her only surviving song.  Some of her letters, though, are not lost.”

Urs set the print-out on Lacroix’s desk and stepped up beside him.  “Who was she?”

“A mortal.  She died in 1247, in what is now France, of ... some _malady_.”  His tone slid into a growl and he spun around.  His eyes flared gold.  “Twice, I could have brought her across.  I should have brought her across!”

“You still miss her,” Urs marveled.  “Would you really still have her with you, after all this time?”

“I would never let her go!  Oh, yes, I learned that lesson well.  I do not ... let go.”  Lacroix cupped Urs’s face with both hands, gently holding her in place as she looked up at him.  “Your voice is exquisite.”  He kissed her brow.  “You resurrect her words.”  He kissed the bridge of her nose.  “You bring her back to me.”

“Lacroix—” Urs breathed.  His strength and approval had warmed her blood until she imagined that she could feel her dead heart beating.

He released her.  His eyes still burned.  “Yes?”

“Never mind.”  Urs took his hands.  Until he pulled away, she had not realized that she had pressed against him.  Her own eyes ignited with the vampire’s consuming fire.  Her hunger surged.  His devotion to the long-dead _trobairitz_ excited her, as if she could make that devotion her own, never to be abandoned again.  “Yes.”

“What was the question?” Lacroix bent toward her.

Urs stroked her fingertips along his jaw and tilted his lips to hers.

The first taste of his kiss drowned all her efforts since Jacqueline.  Urs was once again the sad, confused girl who had never denied Lemieux; the sad, ravenous vampire who had awakened in Javier’s embrace.  In Lacroix’s touch and by his blood, Urs knew, she could have everything that she had not yet learned not to want.  She could be protected, cherished, accepted, by a man much older, wiser, more powerful than herself.  Had the writer of the song wanted this from him, too?  Or had the _trobairitz_ held him an equal, or even a supplicant?  The answer lay in the words Urs could not read.  And then it did not matter; the world collapsed to the moment and the blood.  Urs found his fangs with her tongue and shuddered.

If the echo of another voice in her heart went unheeded, that voice, at least, would understand.  Nick knew temptation, too.

— ♫ —

The heavy winter clouds made the solar habitable for Lacroix’s kind in the afternoons, if only barely.  He sat in the shadowed corner on the same wall as the opulently glazed mullioned windows, ostensibly laboring over accounts and correspondence, but with his eyes much more often on — among the Countess de Ventadorn and her ladies — Fleur.

All of the women had textile tasks of some sort, from the tiniest embroidery to a tapestry loom, but what occupied hands left minds and tongues free.  Some managed to fit chess moves between stitches, and one often read, played or sang to the rest.  Yesterday, Fleur and Nicholas had delivered an instructional discourse on hawking, for which their natal Brabant was famed, driving Lacroix to distraction as fierce joy in blood sport dripped equally from the siblings’ lips.  Given this of Fleur as a mortal, to what might she rise as a vampire?  Lacroix again cursed the pledge that bound him to leave her as she was.  Today, Nicholas was at the smithy with the Count, and Fleur hummed her entry for their little Floral Games.

Lacroix had memorized her tune as it had grown through the past week, from a slice of a scale to an air of teasing affirmation.  Now, however, she repeated the same short run of notes over and again, frowning each time she reached the last.  “You can change the melody to fit the words as easily as the other way around, you know,” he offered, wiping his pen.

“Perhaps _you_ can,” Fleur grimaced, “but I always find words the more flexible ingredient.  I began with the score for that very reason; otherwise, I would arrive at the contest with all words and no music!”

“May I offer my assistance?  If I might borrow an instrument, I could present your melody back to you, for you to deck with words as it unfurls.”

“What do you play?”  Fleur beckoned to the servant posted at the door for just such errands.

“One of the lyras popular among her ladyship’s courtiers would be fine.  My preference would be a Saracen _rebab_ , but I have not seen one here.”

“What is a _rebab_?”  Fleur sent the servant to appropriate the first lyra he found not in use — except her ladyship’s own, of course.  Then she set aside her needlework and leaned forward into Lacroix’s explanation of the differences between European and Persian bowed instruments.

Fleur’s enthusiasm for new knowledge had not faded since she was a girl scouring the heavens, Lacroix reflected, and neither had her rapt attention’s effect on him.  For a moment, he could not remember why he had acceded to Nicholas’s request to spare his sister her humanity.

_“Have you forgotten your own lessons?  Let go your mortal bonds.”  
“My immortality has nothing to do with my feeling: love!”_

Lacroix wanted her.  Then, now, always.  He would have all of her, and then he would have her forever ... just like Nicholas.  Why not?  Only his agreement with Nicholas stood in his way.  Nicholas’s forfeit of a theoretical future mortal love was gossamer in the wind!  Little enough to yield.

The instrument came.  Lacroix tested and tuned the strings and the bow.  He then stroked from the wood and gut the melody Fleur had made.

“Oh, yes!”  She laughed in unembarrassed delight to hear her new tune from the outside for the first time.  “Yes!  Please, again!”

Her appreciation made him wish to gratify her.  He scorned to acknowledge this inexcusable, inexplicable weakness, confident that it would soon drown in the flood of her mortal blood.  He would stymie remorseless time and possess this perfection for himself, eternally.

But then her voice joined his bow; he was lost.  Her song soared not only above the notes, beyond the tune, but through the heart of creation.  She tried one word, then another; she put the emphasis here, then there.  Closing her eyes and flying by her own invention, she formed void into new meaning ... new beauty.  And she carried him with her.

Lacroix knew that he could have this for his own, for as long as a candle segment took to burn, in the throes of blood knowledge.  But did it really, as some whispered, take a mortal soul to chart such heights?  Did something more than the life come with the blood?  No!  Lacroix had known vampire artists.  And yet ...

_“If you truly love Fleur, Lacroix, you will not destroy that.  You will not.”  
“It is a great irony, is it not, that a cold, still heart can feel such pain?”_

How close Fleur seemed as she sang, her voice inside him and out, his instrument joining her creation.  How like riding a wave of blood, a swell of passion.  He did not wish it to end.  Lacroix followed Fleur though the final couplet again and again as she stretched and molded words.  Suddenly, he broke away, entering the verse once more. Her eyes flew open; he captured them.

She lifted her brows, but her voice followed him back to the opening, beginning anew.

Lacroix resolved to satisfy his promise to Fleur and his agreement with Nicholas, both.  His word would stand.  He determined to slake his cravings, as well.  Even if he chose not to possess Fleur through her blood — and it was his choice, not Nicholas’s, not hers — she would nevertheless be his.  He would have it all; he would have them both.  As Fleur’s books had shown her, eternity took many forms.

This time, when the lyra and the voice reached the couplet together, the words and the tune fit.


	4. Bridge

Urs awoke in Lacroix’s arms, in his bed.  Across the room, in a thick glass ball on a low table, a single candle burned, giving ample light to vampire eyes.  Nearby, a vase of white roses and common daisies perfumed the air, covering the dregs of the bottles that Urs and Lacroix had emptied.

Urs turned, gingerly at first, but then arched her back and stretched when she realized that Lacroix’s sleep was heavy with her blood.  She, conversely, felt energized by his.  Satisfied, but not sated.  She reveled in an electric tingle from muscle to muscle, the velvet stroke of skin on skin.  She kissed the curve of his neck.

He did not stir.  Urs’s skin attempted a blush as she remembered his pleased discovery that she never climaxed without blood.  Javier, and most vampires of her intimate acquaintance, often could.  She'd felt broken by comparison.  Lacroix had dismissed that view.  Urs had not followed all he'd said about age and lineage and potential, but she'd felt his relish as he took her to the limit where she fought her fangs into his veins.  She'd certainly understood his boast of this trait for all his line.  That meant that Nick was like this, too, Urs thought, her imagination leaping to extending her wrist to Nick, seeing that need in his eyes and being the one to ... as her body responded to her fantasy, she really did blush with the ample blood in her veins.  She had no business thinking of Nick that way.  He'd been nothing but kind and respectful.  And hadn’t Javier told her that Nick was involved with a human woman — a doctor, or scientist, or something? — who was trying to help him recover his mortality?  Better than a co-dependent vampire bar singer, at any rate.  Nick deserved to win his dreams.

Urs rolled away from Lacroix.  She picked up his shirt from beside the bed, pulled it on, and fastened the middle buttons as she padded across the deep carpet to the low divan beyond the candle.  Sitting cross-legged in the corner, she watched the flickering light on Lacroix’s face and sorted through the images still vivid from his blood.  The _troubairitz_ had been blonde and blue-eyed, like Urs, and their voices pitched similarly, but what else they might have in common baffled Urs.  Lacroix’s enduring passion for this lost love spiraled out greedily through her many gifts, intellectual, artistic, healing, hunting; there was no skill Lacroix valued that this woman hadn't owned ... at least, in his eyes.  And it was through his eyes that Urs was looking when she realized that the dead woman had looked back at him with Nick’s eyes.

A relative ...  All at once, the sensations aligned with the images, and Urs knew.  It was only blood insight, passing away within the hour, but as long as it lasted, she would feel how Lacroix’s desires for Nick’s sister and for Nick had entangled hopelessly over the centuries, if not from the start.  Lacroix had given up the sister the better to keep the brother.  That choice — that betrayal — had planted a mustard seed of guilt in him, deep, irritating, impossible to acknowledge as his own; he had hidden it, wrapping it in layer after layer of justification through eight centuries, creating the shining pearl of his devotion, the white rose that never withered.

By now, that love was no less real than any.  But where Javier had betrayed Urs by bringing her across, Lacroix had betrayed Nick’s sister by leaving her behind.  Even this paragon who shone so in Lacroix’s blood-truth had been abandoned.  A mirthless laugh escaped Urs.  She'd pretended that she went in with her eyes open this time, that she knew what Lacroix was, and what she was, herself.  That a moment, an hour, a day would be enough.  But she teetered on the same lonely ledge as always.

“Urs?”  Lacroix opened his eyes.

She smiled.  In his position, her own dreams might have confused the name on her lips. Her dreams were like that, sometimes.  “Good afternoon.”

He flipped down the comforter and raised his eyebrows.

She shook her head.  “What was the promise that you wanted me to help you keep?  To your _troubairitz_ — Nick’s sister.”

“Ah.”  Lacroix pushed himself up on one arm.  “Her name was Fleur.  De Brabant by birth, de Corréze by marriage.  I pledged to give her ... forever.”

“But you broke that promise.”

“I always keep my word.”  Lacroix frowned.  “I merely ... reinterpreted it.”

“Can you do that?”  Urs looked at the flowers in the vase.  “Change just one side of an agreement?”

“Tempting as it is to think that the blood brings all verity on its tide, we then encounter these little ... omissions.  It shows you that she is Nicholas’s sister.  Does it also show you that Nicholas attempted to take my life when I came to Toronto?”

Urs searched the fading images; no such confrontation opened to her.  What line must finally have been crossed, to drive Nick to kill the one who made him?  Come to think of it, what else was missing from her keyhole glimpse into Lacroix’s existence?  She frowned.

“I have her song.  I have her letters to Nicholas.  I tracked her legitimate descendants until the Revolution wiped them out.”  Lacroix sat up and leaned against the headboard.  “After Nicholas’s misguided assault, I spent ... time ... striving to bestow this treasure-trove of historical materials on academia.”

“They didn’t believe you?”

Lacroix opened his free hand, then let it fall.  “It will be a generation before I can try again. In the meantime, if something were to happen...”

“Oh!”  Boosted by the last of the blood-borne insight, Urs realized, “You want to give her the other kind of immortality: fame!”

“I wish her never to be forgotten, yes.  Nicholas posed a reminder that even I am not sufficiently eternal to guarantee my promise, if I keep her to myself.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“For now, come back to bed.”  Lacroix leaned forward.  “We’ll talk about it tonight.”

Urs chewed her lower lip.  His invitation appealed more than her narrow space downstairs, more than Javier’s wary distance, more than guiltily wondering whether Nick really did belong to someone else.  Lacroix offered everything she had been used to seeking.  But Jacqueline had shown Urs that she did not want to be that anymore, and Nick had believed that she did not have to.  On the other hand, walking away was not a skill that she had ever learned, and Lacroix’s bedroom did not seem like a safe place to start.

Urs looked into the candle flame until it hurt her eyes.  Then she stood and picked up her scattered clothes as she crossed the room.  Setting her bundle aside, she perched on the mattress where Lacroix’s palm had smoothed the sheet.  She clasped her hands together and searched his expression.  “I can enjoy her music with you.  I can’t be her for you.”

Lacroix lifted one hand and stroked Urs’s cheek, then her neck.

A sigh of desire rose up the same path it had always followed.  She used both hands to nudge his fingers away before his touch could change her mind.  The smell of his waking blood rising to her — the opportunity to feed without thought — nearly pulled her back.  But while they were individuals to him, they were also transposable: Nick to Fleur to her ... to another blonde young woman everywhere in his blood: thin, sharp and so very strong ... Urs swallowed.  Lacroix had said she should feel free to say ‘no’ ... hadn’t he?  He claimed to value his word, once given.  “Today was everything I used to want.  But you're what you are, and now I want to change what I am.  Does that make sense?”

“More than you realize.”  He kissed her forehead.  “We’ll say no more about this encounter.  But regarding Fleur’s song—”

Urs nodded.  It was only after she was dressed and on her way downstairs that it crossed her mind to wonder what her blood had told Lacroix of her.

— ♫ —

“I do not understand why you will not come with me,” Fleur protested, packing her linens in a press as a maidservant prepared her furs.  “Surely your business will keep until spring — indeed, your envoy, the steward, Monsieur Savaric, is still abed!”

“I do not understand why you have to go now.”  Lacroix forestalled Nicholas with a gesture.  “Surely such sickness as the courier reports is better avoided than rushed into!”

“I can treat this sickness.”  Fleur drew herself up to her full height, tall for a woman, though nowhere near her looming brother or towering Lacroix.  “Or, rather, Pliny could.  That would be reason enough to go, even were it not my own household — my children, my husband!  You baffle me, Monsieur.”

“He worries for your safety.”  Nicholas sat on her press to help her close it.  “Why not just send the _physic_ recipe back with the courier?  You could even write it — your priest can read, at least.”

Fleur glared.  “All my children learn to read and write Latin as well as their native _langue d'oc_ as soon as they are old enough, and the eldest is working on the _langue d’oui_ with which you and I grew up.  I will not have my daughters married mute into foreign courts, nor my son at the mercy of clerks!”  She dismissed the maid and freed the hangings on one side of the bed to seize them what privacy she could in the shared chamber.  Lowering her voice, she said, “Ebles is providing me a generous escort in addition to my own people.  I ask your company not for two more sword arms, but because I cannot bear to let you go again so soon, Nicholas — and your company, Monsieur, has been an inspiration and a joy.  Please.”

Nicholas asked, “Can we not go, Lacroix?”

Lacroix’s lip curled.  This is what came of humoring Nicholas.  This certainty that Lacroix’s agreement protected his sister had bred an arrogance blinding Nicholas to what he truly was now, and from whom that came.  Smug and content, Nicholas had dared to forget that their agreement imposed obligations on both sides.

_“We will leave as soon as possible.”  
“You have probably done me a favor.  But you must realize that I will demand retribution!”_

“Just until spring?” Nicholas prodded.

“As you wish,” Lacroix snarled. He stepped close to the bed, shadowed by the hangings. At last, after all these strained, unnatural weeks of smothering his blood lust, he let it ignite before Fleur, making coals of his eyes and daggers of his teeth. Fleur gasped, but she did not cry out; wonder again reigned where any other mortal would fear and flee.

_“I understand now! The pallor of your faces, the strange behavior.  I have heard of this: the vampire!”  
“He will make you one of us, whether you desire it or not.”_

Lacroix whispered, “Which shall it be, Nicholas?  Here, or at her home?  For if we go with her, she must come with us.”

“No!” Nicholas stepped in front of Fleur.  “You promised.  We have a bargain!”

“Yes...”  Lacroix hissed.  “But my pledge to her preceded that to you.  What if she chooses to redeem her penalty, and I choose to forego mine?”

“A vampire?” Fleur murmured.  She stepped around Nicholas.  “I have heard of this!  But I have seen you in the day — I have seen you eat —”

“Sophistry,” Lacroix said.  “Misdirection.  We are both what you see now.”

“Nicholas?”

“He speaks truth.  I am what he is — what you must never be, Fleur!”

“I should say not!”  She crossed her arms and looked from one man to the other.  Her eyebrows drew together at their surprise.  “You caution me away from sickness, but surround me with demons?  No.  I wish to learn everything there is to know of this!  And Nicholas, I love you without end and without condition.  But no, I do not invite you across the threshold of my lord’s dwelling to my children.  Why did you become a vampire?  Why would anyone?”

_“My only wish is to be with the one I love!”_

Lacroix knew that triumph and shame must mingle across Nicholas’s features at his sister’s judgment, but Lacroix’s eyes could fix on nothing but Fleur’s face, scorching as the sun in her clear choice.  Ten years ago, she had loved him.  She had been his, to take or leave.  Now, she was willing to play _fin amors_ with him, but it was only play.  Her love rose and set ... elsewhere.

“I shall pack away this memory as well,” Nicholas said.

“No!”  Lacroix snapped his gaze around.  “You think to remain the shining hero in her eyes?”

_“You must tell me everything! The Crusades, the adventures!”_

“You have already traded your future for her choice once, Nicholas.  You pledged your eternal companionship to me — that I may remove any temptation to which you succumb — in exchange for leaving her behind then.  Have you something more to trade for her choice this time?  Bah!”  Lacroix swallowed.  His eyes burned brighter.  “She will remember this.  She will remember _me_!”

Fleur moved her hands to her hips.  “What memory have you ‘packed away’ before?”

“You were younger, then, Fleur...”

“Nicholas—”

_“I promise that after we leave, your life will be good again.  Sleep, now, Fleur.  Sleep and forget.”_

“We do not, unfortunately, have time for you to dismember Nicholas as he deserves for his presumption ten years gone,” Lacroix interrupted.  The vampire’s hellish visage would obscure whatever misborn emotions arose in him, Lacroix knew; he clutched that as a shield in battle.  “What of your song?”

“What?”

“Your yet unfinished entry in our game.  You will not be here to present it.  Do not waste all” — _our_ — “your efforts.  They are ... not unworthy.”

“You flatter me, _amics gens_.”  Fleur approached Lacroix, scrutinizing his true face.  She raised her hand toward his teeth, then dropped it behind her back — in courtesy, he thought, not fear.  Never fear. Her expression softened. “You helped craft the song; you have fair claim on it.  Shall I labor at it in odd hours, as we have done here, and send it by relay courier when it is all that I can make of it?  Do you volunteer to present it for me?”

Lacroix drew back her hand and raised her fingers to his lips; he did not retract the fangs behind them.  “You alone shall take the prize.”


	5. Coda

“It’s marvelous how winter persists. Wouldn’t you agree, Nicholas?” Lacroix turned away from the rehearsal on stage to watch his estranged _protégé_ enter the otherwise deserted Raven. A cloud of snow, whipped by the storm that had prematurely darkened the afternoon, came with him. “Against all the plows and salt and ... tanning beds ... its chill grasp remains unshakable.”

“Spring always breaks out in the end.”  Nicholas brushed off his coat over the mat, careful not to make a puddle for someone else to mop up.  Lacroix sighed; such petty thoughtfulness would never have crossed the mind of the old Nicholas — _his_ Nicholas, aristocratic, insatiable and magnificent, the Nicholas he would recover at last, restoring the perfection that had existed before this delusion of change.  The detective strolled down the stairs, smiling as his eyes strayed to Urs and her associates.  “New life will come.”

Lacroix considered invoking 1816 — “the year without a summer” — but instead just drained his latest glass and circled behind the bar to pour himself another.  It was his bar, after all.  “I’d extend the hospitality of the establishment, but doubtless you are on duty.  What trespass against Toronto the Good compels you across my threshold this time?”  When no answer was immediately forthcoming, Lacroix prodded, “Or has another ‘demon’ inspired your—”

“Don’t,” Nicholas snarled.

Lacroix smirked.  As little as he wished to acknowledge that incident, he appreciated how it had set Nicholas’s beast prowling the fences, hunting a breach.

Nicholas filled his lungs and then slowly released the air.  “Urs invited me.  I’m here for her, not you.”  He pulled off his winter layers and piled them on a stool, revealing a grey turtleneck.  “And it’s my night off, if that matters.”

“In that case...”  Lacroix set a new goblet before Nicholas and filled it with his most exceptional vintage.  As anticipated, Nicholas jerked, stung, the vampire’s hunger obviously shaking the man’s resolve — but not hard enough to satisfy Lacroix.  Neither the gunshot-wound amnesia nor the so-called ‘demon possession’ had been sufficient to derail Nicholas’s demented crusade for humanity.  Scorning such happenstances, however convenient, Lacroix reflected that his next move in his campaign to reclaim Nicholas was long-laid and time-tested.

And about to spring.

Nicholas stepped away and slid his hands into his pockets.  “What's that they’re playing?”

“Ring a bell, does it?”  The contemporary rhythm and instrumentation crafted by Urs’s ensemble made Fleur’s composition strange to Lacroix, but the words remained hers.  That is, hers as she would surely have written them, had Nicholas permitted her the immortality — the pure consistency — for which she had asked Lacroix in the garden of Castle Brabant.  “Or strum a lyra, as the case may be.”

“I can’t quite place—”  Nicholas stopped when the verse alternated from modern English to its original Occitan.  He closed his eyes.  He listened.  When the bridge returned, he murmured, “You had it all this time?”

“Nothing true ever changes, Nicholas.”

“Only truth is strong enough to bear change.  Anything less breaks.”  Nicholas opened his eyes.  “Do they know?”

“The identity of the lyricist?  Of course.”

**— ♫ —**

Urs had just launched the first verse when a cold blast draw her eyes to the entrance.  She watched Nick brush snow off his wool coat and speak with Lacroix.  Whether Nick had come for Lacroix, or on police business, or at her hesitant suggestion that he might enjoy hearing their latest song without a crowd, seeing him brightened her night.  Buoyed by his nearness, Urs focused on the new melody, and on the words that she had just begun to understand.

She was not, however, able to ignore the scent of uncut human blood as Lacroix poured it.  She watched Nick step away.  She bristled at Lacroix’s uncalled-for baiting of Nick; both men must have known how that offer would end, if even she knew, but Lacroix put Nick through that wringer, anyway.  Urs grasped a little of what Nick’s self-control cost.  She wanted to learn that kind of determination.

When Nick strode out in front of the stage, Urs spread her hands and sang on.   Her voice warmed with Nick’s eyes and ears on her; she couldn’t help it.  Until she closed her lips behind the last word, she poured herself into the song that he was drinking in.

“Fifteen minutes, everybody!”  Hiroshi set his drumsticks on his chair.

Urs held up her forefinger at Nick and turned to her bandmates.  “That one really worked, I think?”

“It’s getting there,” Hiroshi said.  He picked up his clipboard and headed for the lounge.  “The vibrato is still too modern, though.”

Morris ruffled Urs’s hair with a grin as he followed Hiroshi.

“Gorgeous!” Theo exclaimed, throwing an arm around Urs’s shoulders.  “Never mind Hiroshi.  What if we— oh!”  Theo spotted Nick waiting, blinked, and then winked at Urs.  She swatted him; he danced out of reach and bounded off the stage.  “I’ll hold the thought!”

Urs and Nick shared a grin.

“You sing it beautifully,” Nick said.  “But some of the words are wrong.”

“Really?”  Urs looked at Lacroix across the empty dance floor.  He didn’t meet her eyes.  He didn’t disguise that he was watching them, either.  Urs shivered.  She knew what it was like under the gaze of someone who thought he owned you.  “The original?  Or the translation?”

“Both.”  Nick mounted the stage.  “Do you have a pencil?”

Urs found one in Hiroshi’s kit.  She brought it to Nick at Theo’s piano, where Nick was paging through the sheet music.  She sat next to him, not touching, but aware of everywhere they could touch if either of them chose.

“You see here?”  Nick pointed at the paper with the pencil in his right hand.  He played a chord with his left, and then played it again down an octave.  “The stanzas alternate between the woman’s voice and the man’s.  It’s a debate.”

“About love.”

“Yes.  And _this_ word” — he poked the page in three spots — “should really be _this_ word” — he spelled it out — “in the _langue d'oc_.”

“And in English?”

“Let me think.  Um, ranks and roles, different gifts ... maybe ‘equality’?  ‘Complementarity’?  It sounds anachronistic, but if you knew my sister—”

“I wish I had.”  Urs looked at her hands in her lap.  “I think I could have learned a lot from her.”

“Fleur was rich, titled and loved.”  Nick took Urs’s hand.  She looked up into a new smile that smoothed his brow and lit his eyes; her heart beat.  Nick said, “She could have learned a lot from you, too.”

Urs rested her head on Nick’s shoulder.

**— ♫ —**

Lacroix could not see their faces, but he found promise in the silence before Nicholas began playing the tune.

“Matchmaking, Lacroix?” Hiroshi came from the lounge door to the corner of the bar.  “I must admit that, for a while, I actually believed that you wanted Urs for yourself.”

Lacroix offered the musician the goblet that Nicholas had snubbed.  “Surely you know me better than that, Hiroshi _no Kimi_.  She serves best precisely where I have placed her.  She will yield him back to me, all unwitting.  I’ve been down this road with him before.”

“Some roads branch.”  Hiroshi took a single, slow sip of blood, then replaced the goblet on the bar.  “Those two,” he nodded at Urs and Nicholas, “may prove stronger together than they ever achieved apart.”

“Bah,” Lacroix snorted.  He knew Nicholas.  He knew what bait that chivalry-muddled heart would take, and he knew the glory of Nicholas unleashed, when those ideals cracked and crashed, as they always must.  Urs’s very vampirism would emend the unfortunate overreach of the ballet dancer incident; this time, Lacroix would have his Nicholas back.

Lacroix had traded Fleur for Nicholas, after all.  That was the bargain.  He would not fail to collect.

“ _Eglantina a’Argent_ ,” Hiroshi said.  “The Golden Wild Rose.  Or Golden Sweet Briar, if you prefer.”

“What?”

“Our band’s name.  It’s the lifetime achievement prize in the modern revival of the Floral Games.  Theo likes that there’s no end to the myths and stories with which he can connect it.  Morris likes the political nuance of Occitan identity.”

“And you?”  Lacroix clipped the words.

“I like that Urs suggested it.”  Hiroshi looked past Lacroix at the stage, where Urs had begun to sing to Nicholas’s playing.  “You didn’t tell her, did you?  No, of course not.  And she hardly went to the library to research _Floralia_ and the _Jeux floraux_.  She pulled it out of thin air.  There’s more to that woman than what shipwrecked her on our dark shore, _Legate_ Lucius.”

Lacroix frowned.  Across the club, Nicholas and Urs began the song again.  This time, both voices rose together in what the song had never been before.  A duet.

 

**— End —**

**Author's Note:**

>  **Disclaimers.** Parriot and Cohen created _Forever Knight_. Sony owns it. No infringement is intended. Everything except the real historical places and people, of course, is entirely fictional (Chateau de Ventadorn exists; vampires don’t).
> 
>  **Canon.** This story fits after “Sons of Belial” and before “Fever.” The italicized quotations all come from “Be My Valentine.” The song Urs sings at the start is “Dark Side of the Glass” from the series soundtrack, sung by Lori Yates. Fleur’s episodes are “Be My Valentine” and “Fallen Idol,” with additional allusions elsewhere. Urs appears in “Black Buddha Part 2,” “Hearts of Darkness,” “Trophy Girl” and “Ashes to Ashes.” Jacqueline, often invoked here by Urs, is the vampire personality of the woman with multiple personalities in “Hearts of Darkness.” Seline and Divia, invoked obliquely, come from “A More Permanent Hell” and “Ashes to Ashes.” In “Black Buddha Part 2,” Lacroix introduces Urs to Nick as “an innocent goddess,” a strange remark that aligns interestingly both with the obsession with Sylvaine’s “purity” in “Love You to Death,” and that with Fleur’s “innocence” in “Be My Valentine.” In "Ashes to Ashes," Urs has a nightmare of a decapitated child standing over her; this opened speculation that Urs might have psychic sensitivities.
> 
>  **Citations and History.** I drew primarily on _The Women Troubadors_ by Meg Bogin (1976, Paddington Press), but also on my usual historical resources, especially books by Joseph and Frances Gies, and the always suspect but indefatigable Wikipedia. [Castle Ventadorn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_de_Ventadour) is a real place; you can visit it! [Maria de Ventadorn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_de_Ventadorn) and her husband Ebles V were real historical figures, although I take liberties with their timelines; Maria is one of the very few _[trobairitz](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trobairitz)_ whose work has survived to the present. [Ancient Roman _Floralia_](http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/calendar/floralia.html) and the [medieval Occitan _Jeux floraux_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floral_Games) were both real, although the genuine Floral Games revival began a century too late for Fleur or Maria (and I don’t think that women participated, anyway). Lacroix’s canonical instrument is the [rebec](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebec), of course, but that product of the rebab and lyra was not called by that term until later.
> 
>  **Language.** In modern French, the title means "[She] Sings Anew." In the flashbacks, the characters largely speak medieval Occitan, the language of the troubadours in what is now southern France (and parts of Spain and Italy). I have often made a fuss distinguishing between the spellings "Nicholas" (English) and "Nicolas" (French), to match the actors' pronunciations but, here, I stuck with "Nicholas" throughout (I trust you know how Lacroix and Fleur each say it, regardless). For similar reasons, I generally used the British "your ladyship" instead of the French "madame le comtesse."
> 
>  **Inspiration and Beta-Reading.** I wrote this piece for Hearts_blood in the 2012 FKFicFest game. Hearts_blood prompted: “ _"You can owe nothing, if you give back its light to the sun." — A. Porchia. There is a connection between what Lacroix feels for Urs and what he once felt for Fleur._ ” She wrote that she enjoys: _angst, art/music as a plot point and historical guest stars_. My thanks to Wiliqueen for checking the musical references! My thanks to Wiliqueen and Skieswideopen for cheerleading and catching mistakes! My thanks to Batdina for all of that _plus_ challenging me to clarify and extend the characters’ motivations!
> 
>  **Thank you for reading!** Constructive criticism is welcome. Please let me know what you think.


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